TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/82/82living

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                ]½R                                                          January 18, 1982 

LIVING

Games That Play People

Those beeping video invaders are dazzling, fun--and even
addictive


Let us have no more lamentation that our microprocessed era
lacks heroes (plinkety-plunk of Pete Seeger's banjo). The spirit
of mighty John Henry, the steel-driving man who beat the steam
drill (plunk- plunk-plunk), lives on in the indomitable courage
and abused optic nerves of a Mount Prospect, Ill., high school
boy named Steve Juraszek (Seeger whacks out several yards of
fancy banjo work and begins a ballad):

Well, Steve Juraszek dropped in his quarter, Just half an hour
before noon (plink-plunk). He would die in the end, when the
blasters zapped his men. But he vowed that wouldn't happen soon,
poor boy. He vowed that wouldn't happen soon.

At six that night they called his mother. Said, "Ma'am, your
boy's not comin' home. He's shootin' fast and hot, at the
mutants and the pods. And the microchip is processing a groan,
oh my, The microchip is letting out a groan."

Oh, they fed him on pizza and cola. His fingers were cramping
up and cold. His eyeballs were raw,when a dum-dee-dum he saw.
And it something, dum-dee-dum foretold.*

What nonsense is this?  The answer is very nearly, but perhaps
not quite, in the increasingly crowded category labeled If You
Have to Ask, You Will Never Understand. What Juraszek, 15,
recently did at an Arlington Heights, Ill., arcade called One
Step Beyond was play Defender, one of those beeping, flashing,
quarter-eating arcade video games, for 16 hours and 34 minutes
on the same 25 cents, ringing up a score of 15,963,100 before
he finally made a mistake and lost his last ship. Anyone who
knows arcade games,and especially Defender, which is one of the
most difficult, will agree that this is very close to being
impossible. It is definitely not one of those non- feats thought
up by the untalented to memorialize themselves in The Guinness
Book of World Records, such as eating seven miles of spaghetti,
or riding an exercise bicycle for a week and a half.

Defender is an attack-from-outer-space game. It is played on a
large color video screen where nullity bombs and destructo beams
are hurled at the player by the machine's computer. Increasingly
rowdy sound effects suggest what James Joyce, under the
influence of William Blake (who would have loved these gadgets),
called "the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling
masonry, and time one livid final flame."  The Defender player
controls a small cannon-firing jet plane that flies at varying
altitudes and speeds over a barren planetscape. He must shoot
down, a bewildering variety of alien bad guys, each with his own
pattern of behavior, dodge an assortment of missiles, and rescue
helpless spacemen, vulnerable to being kidnapped, who appear
randomly on the planet's surface. He must have reflexive control
of a joystick that determines altitude and of five separate
buttons that fire the cannon, change forward thrust, reverse
direction, make the ship skim off the screen into hyperspace and
fire a limited supply of smart bombs, which blow up everything
in sight. As is fiendishly true of all of the good new video
games, as the game progresses. Defender shifts to subtler
strategies and sends out its alien waves with increasing speed.
You play the machine and it plays you.

A neophyte has as much chance with Defender as he would if he
were to take over the controls of an F-16. A reasonably good
video-game athlete--that is how game junkies are beginning to
describe themselves--will last it out for a few thousand points,
or a couple of minutes. A superb player, the kind not seen in
every arcade, may hit 500,000 on his best day. That is why when
Juraszek began to close in on 1 million points toward the end
of the first hour of his enchanted run, people began to notice.
Darrell Schultz, one of the arcade's owners, asked Steven if he
thought he could set a record."

"I said, `Yeah,'" Juraszek recalls, "and he said, `Go for it!'"
Juraszek is a gangly young man who began playing pinball when
he was ten, before video games had hit the scene. "I could buy
a car or something with the money I've put int games," he says,
with no appearance of regret. He started playing Defender in
June, and by August he was pretty good. On his record day he
kept up his strength by snapping at pizza slices that people
held in front of his face. He said later that he was so excited
he never even thought about going to the bathroom. His mother
Joanne Juraszek watched for a while, utterly unimpressed, and
agreed reluctantly to let him play till he dropped. "I just
wish," she said later, "that he was this good about doing his
homework."

As the scornful cry "So what?" echoes from glen to glen, and as
the unmoved Joanne Juraszek admits that she finds her son's new
fame "very strong," skeptical citizens might do well to pay
attention to a peculiar clinking sound audible across the land.
The noise is made by the estimated 20 billion quarters that
poured last year into the arcade monsters. This is a figure that
may be the public relations roar of a healthy young industry
beating its chest, but one that investment analysts who
specialize in the entertainment industry agree is not far wrong.
While they spent this $5 billion, video-game addicts also were
spending 75,000 man-years playing the machines.

These figures do not include an estimated $1 billion that
consumers paid for video-game consoles that hook up to home
television sets, and for the expensive cassettes that make them
work. For comparison, $5 billion is exactly twice the reported
take in the last fiscal year of all of the casinos in Nevada.
It is almost twice the $2.8 billion gross of the U.S. movie
industry. And it is three times more than the combined
television revenues and gate receipts last year of major league
baseball, basketball and football.

From what vast aquifer of cash does this astonishing gush of
money flow?  From the lunch money of schoolchildren, say angry
parents who are determined, so to speak, to give video games no
quarter. The town fathers of Irvington, N.Y. (pop. 6,000), rose
up in wrath last July and passed an ordinance designed "to
protect the adolescents of the village against he evils
associated with gambling" (though video games offer no cash
payoff and indeed almost never click out a single free game);
they limited each establishment to three machines. Ralph
Provenzano, owner of a deli opposite the Irvington Middle
School, resents the suggestion that he is corrupting the youth,
but agreed to turn off his three machines (Defender, Pac Man and
Centipede) before the start of classes each morning. With some
justice, he says, "I baby-sat a bunch of kids here all summer.
It may have cost them money, but they were here, they were safe,
and they didn't get into trouble."

The fears that occasionally are voiced of drug-buzzed, beery
teen- agers hanging around video parlors in menacing packs seem
absurdly exaggerated, and the likelihood is that communities
with troublemaking youngsters had them before the arcades
opened. But the video games are enormously addictive, and they
do eat a lot of quarters. Atari, one of the leading video-game
manufacturers, advertises a cheerful, fast-moving and very
popular arcade game called Centipede with the words "Chomp,
Chomp, Chomp, Chomp, Chomp" above a drawing of a
voracious-looking centipede gnawing a coin.

An adult observer in New London, N.H. (pop. 3,000), wanders
into Egan's, a pizza parlor with twelve video games, which has
become the town's teen hangout since it opened a few months ago.
The place is clean and friendly, with no smell of funny
cigarettes (many arcades sternly forbid smoking of any kind) and
nothing in sight more menacing than an anchovy pizza. But a
conversation with a twelve- year-old boy who is holding his own
against Scramble, a Stern Electronics game in which the player
tries to fly a jet through what looks like Mammoth Cave,
produces unsettling information. "I usually bring $20," says the
boy, when asked how much money he spends. As the observer is
digesting this, the boy adds, "But today I brought $40."
Proprietor Bob Egan, an insurance broker in New Jersey before he
moved to New Hampshire last year, says that he too was
surprised, but yes, the boy did change $40.

In Orlando, Fla., the consensus of fifth-grader at Blankner
Elementary School is that $3 is a "minimum satisfactory amount"
to take to an arcade, but several children talked of spending
$10 or $20. "I used to spend money on my bike," one boy said
ruefully. Not all game players throw huge sums into the coin
chutes, but they agree that it takes an investment of between
$20 and $50 to become proficient at any game challenging enough
to be fun. There is no question that the money drain is one
reason why such communities as Babylon, Long, Island, Oakland,
Calif., Pembroke Pines, Fla., and Durham, N.H., have passed
ordinances restricting play by teen-agers of various ages. The
New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union asked that enforcement be
postponed till the U.S. Supreme Court rules on an ordinance
passed in Mesquite, Texas, forbidding play by people under 17.
Lower courts have twice struck down the ordinance.

The fact is, however, that teen-agers hoping to bankrupt
themselves blissfully with a session of Asteroids or Missile
command may be frustrated not by a prejudicial ordinance but by
a lunchtime crowd of adults monopolizing the machines. The
Station Break Family Amusement Center in Washington's L'Enfant
Plaza opens at 7 a.m.; by 7:15 a dozen men in business suits are
blasting away at the games while coffee in plastic cups grows
cold. L'Enfant Plaza is within walking distance of at least five
major Government agencies. "Office workers seem to need to blow
it out" in their fantasies more than other people, says Tom
McAutliffe, 33, vice president for operations of the 51-store
chain that own the arcade.

By lunchtime, with no teen-agers and not one pair of blue jeans
in sight, the 47 machines are making a commotion like Mount St.
Helens clearing its throat. Curt Myron, 37, is there, a
mortgage supervisor at HUD, who is one of the arcade's top guns.
Years ago, pinball cowboys would tape notes to the sides of the
machines boasting of their best scores. One of the cleverest
come-ons of the video games is circuitry that congratulates
hot-shooters with GREAT GAME! and the opportunity to record
on-screen their initials and scores for a display that flashes
periodically. It is the solid- state equivalent of "D. Boone
Killed a Bar," and it means that Myron, who earned the four top
scores on the arcade's Centipede machine, is held in awe by the
other regulars. He skips lunch, he says, and plays every day,
so proficiently that he rarely spends more than 75 cents. "I
also play in airports," he says, "much to my wife's chagrin."

Eric Mondres, 26, a Department of Agriculture staffer, is less
cheerful about his addiction. "It's like a drug," he says. You
see the same people here week after week. I've tried to wean
myself. I'd like to have back all the money I've spent."  Near
by, wearing a wet raincoat and steamy glasses,a middle-aged man
jabs furiously at the thruster of a Star Castle game. He admits
to being an attorney in private practice, but says, "I'd really
rather you didn't use my name. This is my secret place. It would
drive my wife crazy. I really don't come here very often."  Two
hours later, he is still there battling the machine's alien
psychology--and his own.

An onlooker watching such a scene and disposed to gloom would
have no trouble detecting the smell of society's burning
insulation. Contrariwise, an optimist sees these lunchless
loners as sensible adults wisely granting themselves a period
of therapeutic play, avoiding the intake of cholesterol and
booze, and emptying their minds of clutter by a method quite as
effective as meditation. In Japan, where many of the games
originate, a 29-year-old magazine executive named Shoozo Kimura,
who admits the games have hooked him, views the mass addiction
moodily:  "Tokyo is a big town. You think you are not lonely,
but it is the opposite. People have nothing to do. They don't
care about anything. They can't buy houses. They can do nothing
with their money except play the games."

The video-game craze, more frenzied even than the universal lust
for designer jeans and Kalashnikov assault rifles, has spread
across the globe. In West Germany, merchandisers are toting up
astonishing Christmas season sales figures that may reach $88
million for home- video consoles and cartridges. In Australia,
the quarter-eaters,, actually 20 cents-piece eaters, bring in
$182 million a year. Fascination with the games, often
accompanied by cosmic brooding about their presumed bad effect
on faith, morals and school attendance, seems to be universal.
The games have appeared in Arab settlements in Israel, and in
Soweto, Johannesburg's huge black township. Brazil's laws forbid
the importing of video games, so they are manufactured locally,
and are given the necessary touch of international chic with
such English names as Aster Action and Munch Man. In Mexico
City, the hot arcade is Chispas ("Sparks"). Video arcades are
replacing pool halls as the traditional lounging places for
young men in Madrid.

Homosexual cruising is a problem in Amsterdam's arcades. In
Stockholm, the games are associated in the public mind with
teen-age hoodlumism involving drugs, prostitution and illegal
hard liquor. Video addicts under 18 are banned from arcades in
West Germany, although younger teen-agers manage to play on home
sets in department stores.

In the Philippines, outcries against "the raves of a
destructive social enemy, the electrical bandit,," as one
infuriated citizens' group called the video games, reached such
a level of indignation that President Ferdinand Marcos banned
the machines in November and gave owners two weeks to smash
them. The Catholic Women's League of Caloocan City applauded the
ban, asserting darkly that the games had lured young men into
beer houses, where they saw burlesque dancers. A wealthy
businessman was reduced to public despair because the games had
caused the ruin of one of his children, a 17-year-old son who
infatuation with gadgets was so complete, he refused to attend
school or even see his friends. The distracted father thinks of
sending the boy to school in the U.S., but has doubts about it,
because "I fear the video games will catch up with him there."
 He says that "when it finally dawned on me what had hit me, my
first impulse was to put up a video-machine parlor and let my
son manage what he enjoys doing most. But then my wife prevailed
on me, begging me not to, saying that if I went ahead with my
plan, how many more young boys and girls would be ruined?"  In
the meantime the arcade owners, who, of course, merely hid their
machines, are lobbying President Marcos to relax his ban. Not
long ago, 50 disassembled video games, listed as "rectifying
apparatus parts," were seized by Philippines customs agents.

In Hollywood, on the other hand, Producer Frank Marshall thinks
the video games are "great if you want to take 15 minutes and
block everything out. When you're shooting a movie, you're
constantly on this high level of adrenaline, and these games use
that level to completely absorb you."  He kept an Asteroids
machine in his office during preproduction work on Raiders of
the Lost Ark. "It got out of hand," he confesses. "People
actually got fired for spending too much time on it."
Nevertheless, there are a Defender, a Missile Command and a
Donkey Kong game in the offices he shares with Director Steven
Spielberg and Producer Kathleen Kennedy. Not many citizens can
afford video-arcade games that cost up to $3,500, but two
Manhattan dentists. Phil Pierce and Jeanette Tejada, have a
Space Invaders on order for their waiting room. There are also
machines at other odd way-stops; a Y.M.C.A. in Grand Haven,
Mich.; a Baptist church in Merritt Island, Fla.; the basement
of Yale's freshman dorm. At Fort Eustis, Va., the Army employs
a modified Battlezone as a weapons-training device. The Epilepsy
Center at Johns Hopkins University Medical School uses three
specially wired Atari sets to determine the effects of
anticonvulsant drugs on learning and ability. The advantage of
the games, according to Dr. Eileen Vining, associate director
of the center, is that children are eager to make their best
efforts in eye-hand coordination tests. The Capital Children's
Museum in Washington uses video-game techniques, including
wildly changing colors and fast interaction between machine and
operator, to teach preschoolers abut computers. Children learn
measurement by playing with a hungry cartoon worm that eats
centimeter segments of lines.

Last year Dun & Bradstreet held a conference for 120 of its
managers at Bagatelle Place, a "VIP amusement complex" in the
Rye Town, N.Y., Hilton Hotel, which offers a library, a
cappuccino bar and 33 video games. This classy arcade enforces
a dress code after 6 p.m., and serves banquets at which the
changemaking attendants, upon request, dress in dinner jackets.

Although Bagatelle staffers deny it, experience suggests that
unless these black-tie dinners are stag affairs, they are almost
certain to be social disasters. The reasons are that male arcade
players tend to outnumber females by about 20 to 1, and that
women, especially if they are wives, generally resent the games,
and quite often regard them with outright loathing. Ask men and
women at random to explain this undeniable phenomenon, and you
get chauvinistic patronizing or matronizing of the worst
pop-psychological kind. The most temperate analyst is likely to
mention that most women are not conditioned as children to be
comfortable with complicated gadgets, or to play shooting games.
Ear-weary males, their backs welted with wifely sarcasm, may
grumble that women are afraid to look foolish in public, or that
they simply do not know how to play (a glib reduction comparable
to the feminist slur of a few years ago that men do not know how
to cry). They say that women view the games as black holes,
soaking up male attention, and that even liberated wives are
made nervous when their male protectors act like little boys.
women say they are too sensitive to enjoy the bloodthirsty
games, and men counter that, no, women are simply too
literal-minded to see that the blood is not real and that the
games are harmless fantasy. (Though it is hard to deny that some
of the fantasies are fairly creepy. As Producer Frank Marshall
admits, when you lose your last city--there goes Cleveland--in
Missile Command, "it's depressing.")

The sunny and cheerful exception to the prevalent theme of
electronic Gotterdammerung, and one of the few games so far that
women play in large numbers, is Bally's Pac Man. Pop
psychologizers note that it is not a game of shooting,
but--aha!--engulfing. It may also be the ultimate eating
disorder; the player directs a happy-looking yellow disc around
a maze, as it gobbles cookie-shaped dots, and tries to avoid
some not-very-menacing monsters. It is by no means easy to play,
though some men feel it is unworthy of serious attention because
it has only one hand control. Linda Starkweather, 29, who runs
a beauty salon in Union Park, Fla., got hooked on a Pac Man she
discovered near by at Jake's Ice Cream Shop. So did her two
women employees. Then they found another Pac Man at a
neighborhood sandwich shop and began straggling back late from
lunch hour.

When Starkweather found herself struggling to limit herself at
each session to $3 or $4, the obvious next step was to install
a Pac Man in her shop. "We've spent all our tips already this
morning," she said not long ago, laughing. Ann Williams, one of
her former operators and now a Tupperware saleswoman, calls
herself a "closet Pacperson."  She admits to spending $15 on one
session, and although for a while she didn't tell her husband,
she feels no guilt:  "It's my money; I earned it. There's not
a lot of fun things in life. It's taken away my boredom. I've
never been as serious about anything as Pac Man."

Serious?  Listen to Los Angeles Screenwriter Jeffrey Alan
Fiskin, who discovered Pac Man earlier this year during the
Hollywood writers' strike:  "Oh, pipe down, all you fans of
Asteroids and Defenders," he wrote in California magazine. "Take
your arrested adolescence elsewhere!...We want philosophical
rigor, a metaphor for ..."  The task of Pac Man, Fiskin notes
solemnly, is to clear a labyrinth, and as he succeeds, he
collects point-scoring rewards, all very symbolic: first food
in the form of fruit, then keys--"the key to wisdom, the key to
the next level; ah, the pure Jungian simplicity of it." Fiskin
warns that "you will pay and pay to learn the intricacies of
this labyrinth, these demons. The parallel to psychoanalysis
has, perhaps, not escaped you..."

Like many of the best games, Pac Man is a Japanese design, and
so far Bally's Midway division, the U.S. licensee, has produced
96,600 of the machines here (Asteroids is second, at 70,000; and
third, at 60,000, is space Invaders, the game that began the
video craze three years ago). Counterfeit machines sell briskly,
much to the displeasure of Bally's lawyers, who are kept busy
fighting copyright infringements. Forging a Pac Man or Centipede
game is not much more complicated than pirating a music cassette
or videotape. A modern game may require six $20 ROM 32-K chips,
each of which handles 32,000 bits of information. ROM means
"read only memory," and refers to a permanently programmed chip,
not one that can "learn" and "forget" information. Joel Gilgoff,
owner of a four-store arcade games supply chain called
G.A.M.E.S., in Van Nuys, Calif., says, "That amount of memory
rented for $50,000 a month six years ago."

The waves of color, shape and sound that crash about the ears
of the bedazzled player are really incredibly lavish waves of
information. Home TV and such games as Space Invaders use a
"raster" TV monitor that forms images made of tiny line
segments; Asteroids, Space Fury and other games use an "x-y"
monitor that employs unbroken lines. Each line on the TV screen
is controlled by an instruction from the machine's
microprocessor. So is each fragment of each sound. The player
reacts to the images on the screen and the uproar in his ears,
and waggles his controls, which flash impulses to the
microchips. The machine depicts the player's maneuvers
instantly, and takes its own counter-measures a microsecond
later, all the while keeping score. In due course the dreaded
"Game Over" sign flashes, as the chips have ordained.

A desk-top machine called an EPROM programmer (for Erasable
Programmable Read Only Memory) can steal the information on a
programmed chip and transfer it to a blank chip in about one
minute. EPROM units cost about $2,500, which is a great
improvement over the $1 million or more it takes to develop a
successful new game. Thus it is not hard for a counterfeiter to
offer immediate delivery and a price several hundred dollars
lower than list.

Ten minutes ago, let's say, Pac Man pirates--yo, ho, ho and a
chip of ROM--did not exist. Now they are only one of the dangers
in a fast- shifting market in which hot-shot operators whisper
into the ears of kindly and greedy old candy-store proprietors
that the right game in a good location can bring in $400 a week,
or more than a strong man can earn selling used cars. Put in one
and you've got a used-car salesman. Take ten and you have a tame
orthodontist on a leash. A few store and arcade owners buy their
own game machines, counterfeit or not, but most give floor space
to machines owned by distributors who farm out and service
hundreds of them. Store owners and distributors generally split
the take equally. In either case a machine usually must earn
back its cost in a few weeks, before local players "learn the
board" and are no longer interested. The $400 figure turns out,
most often, to be sucker bait, dangled to obscure the dreary
truths the markets are becoming saturated and that dud games and
obsolete good games bring in no money at all. The fads whirl by
so fast that Bally does not even manufacture the historic game
Space Invaders any more, although fans buy used machines for
sentimental reasons, and many arcades keep one around as a
gesture toward the old days.

Wait a minute. Old days?  Historic Space Invaders? Just so.
There is prehistory, and that is pinball. (And, of course, in
Japan there were the jingly pachinko games.)  Middle-aged arcade
lurkers learned from pinball the cool, bent-kneed stances and
the correct ominous angle at which to lip a toothpick. Pinball
cost a nickel and had no- K intelligence. Is used
electromechanical kickers and--talk about primitive!--gravity
for power. If you jostled too much it tilted. The very skillful
pinball bandit would lift the entire 500-lb. front ends of
pinball games off the floor and onto the toes of his army boots,
lessening the incline of the table and foxing gravity. If he won
50 free games, as he was likely to, the blood stopped flowing
in his feet. Pinball is still around, although it is not very
lively.

Pong, invented by Atari's founder, Nolan Bushnell, in the early
1970s, signaled the dawn of video-game history. Electronic
paddles slapped a ball--really just a white blip--back and forth
across a black-and-white TV screen. As Pong evolved, it
permitted you to play another person, or, and this was the big
excitement, the game would play you. Pong sold enormously for
a few months in 1973. And then died. It was pushed into
extinction not by a better game, but by its own lack of
intelligence; it took a bit of time to master, but after that
it was no challenge, and players became bored.

Nothing much happened in the arcades during the mid-'70s. Those
were the Dark Ages:  people picked up their pizzas and trudged
home. Magnavox had marketed a console programmed so that some
20 games could be played on home television, but the games were
not much more challenging than Pong. A line of Mattel hand-held,
battery-powered computer games was cleverly engineered, but the
games themselves were dull, and the firm almost lost its shirt.
Milton Bradley sold a good hand-held computer game called
Blockbuster, in which the player tried to break down a wall on
a tiny video screen. The firm also did well with a simple but
clever computer puzzler called Simon; and Texas Instruments made
a supposedly educational game called Speak & Spell that used a
c\voice simulator and talked to you. Chess Challenger 7 made a
good seven-level chess computer and then complicated it
unnecessarily with a voice simulator.

The industry seemed fogbound until 1979. Then, suddenly,
airports, delicatessens, gas stations and Chinese restaurants
started crawling with electronic columns of squiggly, glowing
monsters that marched toward earthmen with a measured thump,
thump, thump that changed, as the battle boiled faster, to a
frenzied thumpthumpthump. The subtleties that make a game great,
or fail to do so, are akin to the mumblings of metaphysics.
Space Invaders, a Japanese import licensed to Bally, had an
eerie capacity for seizing sane people by the imagination. A
minor delight was that the forts behind which the shooter
crouched crumbled as they took enemy fire. A major occasion for
romantic fatalism occurred as each wave of attackers was
expunged and another took its place, so that even the most
valiant defender at last was overwhelmed:  each teen-ager or
corporation blue-suit was his own Beau Geste. But what gave the
machine special fascination was its ability to increase the fury
of the attack and, as the players improved, the mocking bombast
of its splendid sound effects. It was not just a clanking
coin-eater.  It was, or seemed to be, a sentient alien.

Anyone who played Space Invaders even semiseriously in those
days remembers that reports soon spread by jungle telegraph of
stupendous scores racked up elsewhere, by "a kid out in
Chicago," "a guy in Jersey."  But by 1980 there was a new big
video-game hit, Atari's Asteroids. This free-moving,
doom-in-space melodrama, in which the weightless, drifting
shooter tries to blast his way through showers of astral garbage
and an occasional scout ship, also had a measure of immortality
programmed into it:  it was among the first arcade games to
invite heroic scorers to record their initials. No game
manufacturer has bothered yet to program a system in which local
high scores are fed into a national data bank, but there is
nothing impossible about the idea, and it might even be
profitable, as quarters continue to pour down the coin shoots.

Whither vid-mania?  In a Walt Disney film called Tron, to be
released this summer, one designer goes berserk and enters the
microchip world of video games. Just now, the games are
everywhere, and trade publications are full of puff pieces by
manufacturers and distributors assuring each other that the game
phenomenon is not a fad. They may be right; the Brock Hotel
Corp., whose stock registered a 130.2% increase last year, the
third highest on the New York Exchange, owes its success to a
chain of video-and-pizza parlors. Whatever the future holds,
just now the game manufacturers require earth-moving equipment
to clear away the coin. In 1981 Bally's sales jumped to an
estimated $880 million from $693 million in 1980. Williams,
which makes Defender, saw nine months' gross sales go from $83
million in 1980 to $126 million last year, and it has just
opened a new plant in Gurnee, Ill., capable of producing 600 to
700 Defenders a day.

The other big manufacturer is Atari, whose sales are estimated
to have risen more than 120% from 1980 to 1981. Part of this
sunny good fortune comes from its heavily promoted consoles and
game cartridges for play on home TV. Mattel's Intellivision and
Magnavox's Odyssey 2 are the primary competitors with Atari for
the home market, and the odds are that all three will live or
die less on the qualify of their engineering than on the
cleverness of their games. Until home video consoles evolve as
programmable computers (at least two software firms, Broderbund
and USE, are marketing programmable games for Apple home
computers for less than $50), and until somebody makes a
designing break-through on the order of Space Invaders to
popularize them, it seems probable that the arcade coin-eaters
will continue to be the flashiest, noisiest and most
villainously intelligent of the video products.

Talking games are commonplace now; Sega/Gremlin's Space Fury
growls menacingly at prospective players. "So, a creature for
my amusement."  As might be expected, new mazes on the order of
Pac Man were common at a recent trade exposition in Chicago. The
hit of the show was a highly sophisticated space saga called
Eliminator, made by Sega/Gremlin, an imaginative small
manufacturer. Up to four players man the deluxe Eliminator and
try to blast each other and the computer until only one player
survives for the final combat with the computer. Sega/Gremlin
has demonstrated its own three-dimensional game, and a company
official says that it should be on the market in twelve to 20
months. Holgraphic 3-D is a distant possibility, and
voice-activated games may come fairly soon. Only high costs
block the manufacture of arcade space trainers, in which the
player would sit inside a closed, movable cockpit and see
nothing but void and space monsters through his windshield. Such
a gadget may soon be feasible; computer costs are coming down,
and exactions on players are rising to meet them. The 50 cents
game is already a gruesome reality in some arcades, and the $1
game is surely speeding toward us by bankrupto-beam through
hyperspace.

Mere earthlings, meanwhile, cope as best they can. As might be
expected, with-it doctors have detected such video-related
maladies as Space Invaders wrist and Pac Man elbow. And of
course there are psychological swamps into which enthusiasts may
sink. Julie Winecoff, 21, an unemployed truck driver from
Charlotte, N.C., paid her way to an Atari tournament in Chicago
recently, lost ignominiously to Ok-Soo Han, 25, a Korean
immigrant from Los Angeles, and dolefully swore off the stuff.
I'm never going to play another game of Centipede as long as I
live," she said. "I've been whupped bad. I've been sure 'nuff
tore down."

And Steve Juraszek, hero of song and news story?  His high
school banned him from leaving the school grounds for a few days
because he missed afternoon classes on the day he set his
record. But his eye remains on distant peaks. "I'm going to pick
a weekend," he says. "I'll work out before on those spring
things to strengthen my wrists and fingers. Then I'm going to
go to sleep right after school on that Thursday and friday and
I'll start on Saturday morning and go the whole weekend."

...A man ain't nothin' but a man (plink, plunk) But before I let
that Defender beat me down, I'll die with my blaster in my hand
(plink, plunk) Die with my blaster in my hand.


*Or gold, or fold, or mold. A jar of pickled space invaders to
the reader who most ringingly completes this and other
appropriate verses.

--By John Skow. Reported by Steven Holmes/Chicago and Jeff
Melvoin/Los Angeles, with other bureaus